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Sir Ian comes home
Kevin Bourke31/ 3/2006
IN the past couple of years he's been seen on the big screen as
the saintly Gandalf, on Coronation Street as the rascally writer
Mel Hutchwright and on stage as Widow Twankey!
Now the internationally-feted Bolton-born actor Sir Ian McKellen
plays an ordinary man with a shocking secret in The Cut, a deeply
disturbing new piece from Mark Ravenhill, the writer behind
Shopping And F***ing.
It comes to The Lowry next week in the wake of a sold-out season at
the London theatrical powerhouse the Donmar Warehouse.
At home, his character Paul is a loving husband and father. At
work, he administers "the Cut". In a society sickened by his
profession, Paul struggles with his conscience and longs to tell
the truth.
McKellen, whose next big screen outing is the film version of The
Da Vinci Code, had specifically asked Michael Grandage, director of
the play and the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, if he
could work on a piece of new writing.
"That conversation took place about 18 months ago, but then we had
to wait until Ian finished all the X-Men films and other things he
was working on, like Corrie," Grandage laughingly recalls.
So why had McKellen been so especially keen on working on a piece
of new writing, I asked the actor.
"It's exhilarating and scary if you're doing that because you never
quite know what to expect," he said. "If you're doing Twelfth
Night, for instance, you've got to measure up to it. You've seen it
often enough and there are enough people around to tell you that
it's a great play and are you going to bring it off?
"When it's a new text you don't have that kind of reassurance and
you don't feel you're interpreting so much as doing what it is that
the writer wants you to do. But oddly enough, Mark didn't come to
rehearsals very much and I wouldn't have minded if he did. When I'm
doing Shakespeare, I'm always thinking William's just gone off to
the bar and when he comes back he's going to say `what are you
doing with my play?' That's quite a good constraint."
It was also important to McKellen that the play was going to come
out on tour. The Donmar Warehouse began a national touring
programme two years ago with Pirandello's Henry IV, in a new
version by Tom Stoppard.
The precise nature of The Cut is never clarified in the play,
one of the many ways it intrigues and terrifies its audience.
But, in order to play the part of the man who administers it, had
McKellen had to imagine what it was?
"It doesn't have to be the drawing of blood. I suppose The Cut is a
metaphor for the way in which the State can keep an underclass
down," muses the committed campaigner for gay rights. "It's like
the way in India there are The Untouchables. Just by calling them
that, you don't need to cut them.
"Cutting a child's genitalia within a month of birth, what's that
about? It's marking the child for life, saying you're one of us,
even if not that you're somehow lesser.
"I just think it's a primitive way of keeping an underclass down
and I don't need the details of that to make it real for me.
Because I don't know the society where the cut is practised in
quite this way, but it's real enough for him.
"It's also, I think, delving into the nature of sado-masochism. It
reflects the games people play with each other in the marriage,
too.
"I'm not going to tell you who it was," he chuckles, "but a female
MP came to see the show the other night and was talking about where
it might be set. `Half the time', she said, `I thought it might be
post-Apartheid South Africa and the other half I thought it was
Blair's Britain!'
"People just interpret it in their own way and part of our duty is
not to get in the way of that. This isn't a play that comes up with
answers, it's a play that's dealing with how a society tricks its
citizens.
The Cut is at The Lowry from Tuesday until April
8.
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